What 1920s rope-skipping has to do with the birth of paleontology, restaurant entrepreneurship, and Oprah.

One of history’s greatest downfalls is its asymmetry of acclaim, catapulting some figures into legend status while leaving others, even those of great cultural contribution, behind as mere footnotes. Today, we turn to five such unsung heroes whose work and legacy shaped fundamental aspects of modern life.

HENRIETTA LACKS
When Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), an African-American mother of five who migrated from the tobacco farms of Virginia to poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore, died at the tragic age of 31 from cervical cancer, she didn’t realize she’d be the donor of cells that would create the HeLa immortal cell line — a line that didn’t die after a few cell divisions — making possible some of the most seminal discoveries in modern medicine. Though the tumor tissue was taken with neither her knowledge nor her consent, the HeLa cell was crucial in everything from the first polio vaccine to cancer and AIDS research. To date, scientists have grown more than 20 tons of HeLa cells.

Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you’re working on it — and I think writing is the same way.” ~ Rebecca Skloot

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the ever-brilliant Rebecca Skloot weaves a fascinating and tender detective story about HeLa’s legacy through the discovery of Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, who didn’t know her mother but who always knew she wanted to be a scientist. As Skloot and Deborah, infinitely different yet united by the shared quest for answers, unravel one of the most absorbing mysteries of modern science, we also get a rich and sensitive tale about family, community, and the dark side of society’s capacity for exploiting its poorest and most vulnerable members. The book, one of the decade’s most excellent and ambitious science-and-so-much-more reads, is currently being made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.

Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945.

Deborah Lacks at about age four.

Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa 1951.

LINCOLN BEACHEY
“Master Birdman.” “The man who owned the sky.” “The world’s greatest aviator.” Lincoln Beachey (1887-1915) was known by many names and recognized by sight by hundreds of thousands around the world in his heyday — yet, despite having invented aerobatics, pioneered aviation stunts, and set a number of records, he remains practically unknown today. His story is one of optimism, bravery, entrepreneurship and, ultimately, deadly obsession.

Beachey was early to the mechanics game — he opened his own bicycle shop at the age of 13, graduated to repairing motorcycle by 15, and eventually made his way to the emerging and glamorous world of aviation as a dirigible pilot. When he was 17, he set out on a publicity stunt, building his own dirigible and flying it around the Washington Monument, eventually landing it on the White House. His remarkable flying stunts and clever personal branding soon catapulted both Beachey and aviation itself into mainstream, international fame — but his relentless ambition was also the demon of his demise. On March 14, 1915, Beachey set out to impress a crowd of nearly 250,000 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition with a stunt he had never performed in public before — inverted flight. As he intently dove to make a loop and turn the plane onto its back, he failed to notice he was only 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay. Startled, he pulled on the controls to flip the plane back, but strain ripped both wings off, causing the plane to plunge directly into the bay. By the time Navy officers recovered Beachy’s body 1 hour and 45 minutes later, Beachey was long dead — from drowning, not the crash, as an autopsy determined — but rescuers spent nearly 3 hours trying to revive the era’s beloved folk hero. He was 28.

Actually, Beachey is hardly unsung in the literal sense — his final flight became the subject of a popular rope-skipping rhyme from the 1920s, uncovered by the fine folks at Radiolab in their fantastic recent episode on loops. (The same episode that inspired last week’s beautiful and poetic animated short film about the afterlife of a whale and that, in fact, in part inspired this very article on unsung heroes.)

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) is the most important man you’ve never heard of.

One cold winter night in 1417, the clean-shaven, slender young man pulled a manuscript off a dusty library shelf and could barely believe his eyes. In his hands was a thousand-year-old text that changed the course of human thought — the last surviving manuscript of On the Nature of Things, a seminal poem by Roman philosopher Lucretius, full of radical ideas about a universe operating without gods and that matter made up of minuscule particles in perpetual motion, colliding and swerving in ever-changing directions. With Bracciolini’s discovery began the copying and translation of this powerful ancient text, which in turn fueled the Renaissance and inspired minds as diverse as Shakespeare, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Einstein and Freud.

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, acclaimed Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of Bracciolini’s landmark discovery and its impact on centuries of human intellectual life, laying the foundations for nearly everything we take as a cultural given today.

This is a story [of] how the world swerved in a new direction. The agent of change was not a revolution, an implacable army at the gates, or landfall of an unknown continent. […] The epochal change with which this book is concerned — though it has affected all our lives — is not so easily associated with a dramatic image.”

FRED HARVEY
Without Fred Harvey (1835-1901), modern life would be devoid of such staples as Starbucks, Yelp, Top Chef, and even dating — for Harvey pioneered the restaurant chain in North America and thus elevated the restaurant itself from a small-town business to a formidable industry. From his first eating houses along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to his eventual Harvey House empire of restaurants, lunch rooms, dining cars, hotels, and souvenir shops, the cunning entrepreneur and marketer inspired the iconic Judy Garland musical The Harvey Girls (which might, in fact, disqualify him from the “unsung” game) and embodied the spirit that makes America America.

I spent the better portion of my college years sifting through countless rolls of 19th-century newspaper microfilm, calling small public libraries across the American Southwest, and scouring eBay for Harvey ephemera as I helped author Stephen Fried with his research for Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West, One Meal at a Time — a fascinating and lively more-than-biography of Harvey that traces his incredible journey of entrepreneurship, the little-known family drama that surrounded his quest, and his lasting legacy.

MARY ANNING
British fossil collector and paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was only twelve years old and the child of a poor family when she made her first seminal discovery. While fossil-hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England, she found the first dinosaur skeleton, that of an ichthyosaur. Until her landmark discovery, animal extinction was believed to be impossible. Though her gender and social class made it difficult for her to fully participate in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, she read as much scientific literature as she could get her hands on and went on to become a renowned fossil-hunter and dealer, often risking her life in the face of landslides and daunting cliffs. The great Stephen Jay Gould, arguably the most beloved popular science writer of all time, famously called Anning “probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology” — indeed, her work ignited a fundamental shift in scientific thinking about prehistoric life in the early 19th century.

The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World tells Anning’s extraordinary story of curiosity, rigor, self-education, and passionate perseverance in the face of stifling social norms and circumstances. Anning is also the protagonist of a delightful children’s book, Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning.

Like Beachey, Anning too inspired a popular piece of folk poetry, the tongue-twister “She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore.”

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The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

The .com domain is one of the original top-level domains on the Internet, having been around since 1985 and the start of the Domain Name System that we all depend upon so much.

To give you an idea of how the .com domain has grown since its inception, we’ve put together this chart for you:

The number for December 2010 is an estimate based on the Registrar Stats chart and an old domain name industry brief from Verisign. The others come from BV.com.

Quite amazing, isn’t it? Especially when you compare today’s numbers with the modest beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the World Wide Web (you may have heard of it) made everyone flock to the Internet.

P.S. If you wonder about the jagged section in the chart from Registrar Stats, here is the explanation.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From Ancient Greece to quantum mechanics, or what a Chinese room and a cat have to do with infinity.

From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments.

The Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles comes from Ancient Greece and explores motion as an illusion:

The Grandfather Paradox grapples with time travel:

Chinese Room comes from the work of John Searle, originally published in 1980, and deals with artificial intelligence:

Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert, tackles the gargantuan issue of infinity:

The Twin Paradox, first explained by Paul Langevin in 1911, examines special relativity:

Schrödinger’s Cat, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a quantum mechanics mind-bender:

For more such fascination and cognitive calisthenics, you won’t go wrong with Peg Tittle’s What If….Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy .

via Open Culture

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Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie both died within a few days of each other.

In my mind, there are four most important people in the story of computer software. The story begins with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who figured out how to write an operating system (Unix). With this, we got the first powerful beasts.

The third person in the story is Bill Joy, who got the beasts to talk to each other (BSD). This gave us the Internet.

The fourth person in the story is Steve Jobs, who gave the networked beasts a pretty face, who got mere mortals to command the beasts.

Today, the wonders of the world of computing are: iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, Macbook Air. Every single one these is derived from the work of these four people. Wow.

(iPad, iPhone, Macbook Air run variants of Mac OS X, which is derived from NextOS which is a child of BSD. Android is derived from Linux, which is a ground-up rewrite of BSD. Some kindles run Linux, the others a forked Android).

Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie both died within a few days of each other.

In my mind, there are four most important people in the story of computer software. The story begins with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who figured out how to write an operating system (Unix). With this, we got the first powerful beasts.

The third person in the story is Bill Joy, who got the beasts to talk to each other (BSD). This gave us the Internet.

The fourth person in the story is Steve Jobs, who gave the networked beasts a pretty face, who got mere mortals to command the beasts.

Today, the wonders of the world of computing are: iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, Macbook Air. Every single one these is derived from the work of these four people. Wow.

(iPad, iPhone, Macbook Air run variants of Mac OS X, which is derived from NextOS which is a child of BSD. Android is derived from Linux, which is a ground-up rewrite of BSD. Some kindles run Linux, the others a forked Android).

The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you choose to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.

At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.

Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:

(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)

Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.

In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.

Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:

(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)

LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.

In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.

Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:

(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)

“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.

It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.

“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Remarkable photos made better (or worse) using Instagram

In the midst of the Afghan war, Indians have been conserving pre-Islamic art, Buddhist monuments and Mughal gardens, even tracing links back to the Bronze Age.

I'm just glad someone is taking care of the past for the future.

"It was two hours into one of the city’s newest delights: the Around Manhattan Official NYC Architectural Tour. The Chicago Architecture Foundation’s similar tour has been a popular attraction since 1983, but until now, this city’s closest equivalent was the Circle Line — a very distant second. What took the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects so long? Whatever the answer, its timing is fortuitous. It’s only recently that Manhattan’s waterfront has become the playfield of outsize architectural ambition."

My cousin, Rama Dadarkar, who is now an official New York City tour guide can be heard in the video toward the end. She is a Historic Preservation major from Columbia so consider asking for her if you plan on taking the tour

"I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons."

"Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?

The answer surprised me."

"While there is always room for criticism of such actions, likening it to the granting of dictatorial powers to Hitler as Weimer Germany slid into authoritarianism is a stretch of gargantuan proportions. "

"From first life-forms to homo sapiens"

"Among the many criticisms of Twitter, the most common by far is that no one cares what you ate for breakfast. In fact, quite a few people care."

"The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006."

An amazingly extensive Flash presentation of the eastern front in Europe during World War II

This list takes a look at ten of the most significant places around the world that are closed to the general public or are virtually impossible for the general public to visit.

A quick primer on art movements. Helps you hold your own during conversations at parties :)

Here’s a brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from.

"What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage."

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person

Behind the Bill Gates success story is the other William Gates. The senior Mr. Gates balanced a family thrown off kilter by a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight. He served as a quiet counsel as his son jumped into and thrived in the cutthroat business world.

"The site has tremendous potential for further research to unravel the Palaeolithic life in this part of the sub-continent," said the head of the research team P.K.Behera

Then and Now

Here are five of the things I love about Mr. Watterson's famous strip.

Of all the honors a man can be granted--statues, tributes, whores--there's nothing like having your last name turned into a word to ensure your immortality. Your name will ring down through the ages, etched into the language itself, an eternal reminder of your achievements. Unless, of course, you earned the word because you fucked up so badly that the world just had to remember your horrible example.

Al Jaffee's fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.

The often abstract debate over how strict museums should be about shunning ancient artworks of questionable origins -- lest they wind up owning pieces that have been looted and illegally smuggled -- now wears the familiar face of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha.

An online archive of chronology of events, documentations, audio, video, images, media reports and eyewitness accounts of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh in the hands of Pakistan army.

Mark this date.

Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

as moderated by CHARLIE GIBSON & GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS at ABC NEWS

Notice how they get simpler and minimalist.

"Is it always illegal to kill a woman?"

Timeline of the human race. Partly NSFW.

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."-- Governor George W. Bush (R)-TX

The license plate is almost as large as her automobile, but Miss Mary Bay likes her car because it is easy to park.

...and that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Mr. Curtiss, 84, of Shelton, has followed the advice [of oil change every 3000 miles] with the first car he ever owned, a 1929 Ford Model A; it has 200,000 miles on it and still runs.

I'm sure we own 1000x more for 1000x less.

Super Index of Free Children's Books Online